Olin Lathrop wrote:

> Gerhard Fiedler wrote:
>> Of course. The more redundant (that is, verbose) the syntax is, the
>> easier it is both for the programmer to get something wrong and for
>> the compiler to catch when something is wrong.
> 
> Not necessarily, and this is one of the problems with C.  

What "not necessarily"? Sometimes, it seems you don't really try to
understand and go against, just because... :)

> It's not always as obvious to a human when the wrong special character
> is used, for example, than a more verbose keyword.  

This is what I wrote: the more verbose, the easier to catch ("more
obvious") when something is wrong.

> It is easier to get "{" or "}" wrong than the more verbose "begin" or
> "end", for example.  

I think here you're wrong. The probability to type a wrong letter is
about the same per letter, so the probability to type "begin" wrong is
higher than the probability to type "{" wrong. 

> The latter are bigger patterns to match against and more obvious when
> they are wrong, especially to a casual observer.

Exactly... for the reviewer or for the compiler, it's much easier to
catch the error with "begin" than with "{". This is what I wrote. So
again: what "not necessarily"?


> I had exactly this case last week.  I added one more symbol to a C
> ENUM, and apparently typed ")" instead of "}" to close the list. 
> These two look fairly similar, so I didn't notice.  That, and the
> fact that I don't do C that often caused several wasted minutes
> trying to figure out why the code wouldn't compile.  The C18
> compiler's cryptic "syntax error on line xxxx" didn't exactly help
> either.

It seems that the compiler didn't have a problem detecting that there
was something wrong. That the compiler didn't provide you with a helpful
error message is another issue -- that's not a problem with language
syntax but with the specific compiler implementation.

> I'm pretty sure that if I had been required to type END or something
> more verbose than "}", the mistake would never have happened or I
> would have noticed it much quicker.

You can define preprocessor macros and use Begin and End instead of {
and }.

Gerhard
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